Elvis Presley (1935-1977) and Ed Sullivan (1901-1974)

On September 9, 1956 – 63 years ago today – Elvis Presley made his first appearance, live, on The Ed Sullivan Show. (The show was indeed broadcast live in the Eastern and Central time zones, though delayed for the Mountain and Pacific time zones.) It has been suggested that this appearance on that evening 63 years ago marked the ascendance of rock ‘n’ roll as the dominant musical genre in the Western world. 

Television changed everything. Yes, we all know that, but in thinking about this post I’ve realized that so ubiquitous are the screens around us that we should remind ourselves of how recent a phenomenon TV is and the degree to which it has forever changed not just our everyday lives, but our very perceptions of time, distance, shared experience, and collective memory.

Philco “Custom 400” television set, 1955

Television did not become a national mass media in the United States until the mid-1950s, and it didn’t become a cultural force until the 1960s. 

Between 1949 and 1969, the number of American homes with at least one television set rose from under 1 million to over 44 million. During that same period, the number of commercial television stations in the United States went from 69 to 566. Correspondingly, during this same period, advertising revenues paid to American television stations and networks increased from $58 million to $1.5 billion. The television industry – as we understand it today – wasn’t in place until the 1960s.

Since the 1960s, TV has evolved from a fairly homogeneous mass media dominated by the “big three” networks (for you youngsters, those would be ABC, CBS, and NBC) to, in the words of James Poniewozik – chief television critic for The New York Times – “the polarized, zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-entertainment” that it is today.

Johnny Carson (1925-2005

In the process of its evolution, television has, for better or worse, gone a long way towards eliminating regional cultural differences and accents (for example, we read that Johnny Carson’s Iowa/Nebraska twang became the standard “American” accent thanks to his 44-year television career).

Television has changed our sense of time and distance, in that with the advent of live TV, there is no such thing as “time” or “distance”, as we have come to expect instant updates from every corner of the globe, an expectation now fulfilled to a fault by our smart phones. Television changed forever the way we consume information and entertainment, as we have come to expect instant aural (that’s “aural” with an “a”!) and visual gratification.

Among the many earth-shaking changes it has wrought, television has given our species instant and effortless access to live events, allowing us to see and hear life-changing current events from the comfort of our homes as they happen.

In last week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, I mentioned that on Sunday, November 24, 1963, the 9-year-old me was among the many millions of people who saw Jack Ruby shoot (and kill) President Kennedy’s alleged assassin – Lee Harvey Oswald – in the basement of the...